Razor-sharp writing, laugh-out-loud humor, and a sturdy plot combine to make Thomson's sequel to Once a Spy a real treat for thriller fans tired of more of the same old same old. Charlie Clark has left his life as an inveterate gambler far behind as he and girlfriend Alice go on the lam in Switzerland from Alice's employer, the NSA, and a special CIA black ops unit known as Cavalry. The real star of the group is Charlie's father, Drummond Clark, who after a career as a CIA agent is sinking into the throes of early Alzheimer's, but who's able, when the occasion demands, to revive his old skills and save their skins.
Picking up shortly after the events of 2005's Dance of Death, the book opens with the arrival of a package of fine dust at the Museum of Natural History; Diogenes has returned the diamonds he stole earlier. Meanwhile, Aloysius is in prison, having been framed for a number of murders. As his friends plot to spring him, his adversary lays the groundwork for a crowning criminal achievement. A mysterious benefactor funds the restoration of an ancient Egyptian tomb at the museum, but the work is beset by the mayhem Preston and Child's readers have come to expect—gory murders and suggestions of the supernatural.
In the exciting eighth supernatural thriller from bestsellers Preston and Child (after 2006's The Book of the Dead), FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast and his ward, Constance Greene, seek peace of mind at a remote Tibetan monastery, only to fall into yet another perilous, potentially earthshaking assignment. The monastery's abbot asks them to recover a stolen relic, the cryptic Agozyen, which could, in the wrong hands, wipe out humanity. The pair follow the trail to a luxury cruise ship, where a series of brutal murders suggests the relic's evil spirit might already have been invoked.
William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Eyewitnesses claim, and the security camera confirms, that the assailant was their strange, sinister neighbor-a man who, by all reports, was already dead and buried weeks earlier. While Captain Laura Hayward leads the official investigation, Pendergast and Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta undertake their own private-and decidedly unorthodox-quest for the truth.
An unusual serial killer is wreaking havoc in a small corn-growing town in Kansas; he leaves outlandish signatures, such as a mutilated body within a circle of crows on stakes and a ring of broken corn stalks. On his own initiative, Pendergast, no stranger to bizarre murders, shows up to investigate, and the authors make much hay from the contrast between the lean, infinitely refined and impossibly erudite Pendergast, a distinct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, and the down-home milieu he finds himself in. As if to emphasize his ancestry, the authors give Pendergast a Watson here: one Corrie Swanson, a rebellious, pierced and tattooed teenage girl whom he hires as his driver and guide.
